By Tuesday, we knew that Gerry Grogan had polio. Of course. The news raced through the neighborhood, and it’s difficult to explain now what the word “polio” could do to people in those days. The fear, the horror. Just the word. Polio. At the hospital, they wouldn’t let us see her for a while, and her family seemed confused, as if possibly ashamed that this had happened to one of them. We sent flowers. We wrote notes. But I didn’t get to see Gerry Grogan until the following Saturday afternoon. When I walked into the ward, she was alone in a bed against the far wall. She turned and saw me and started to cry. I tried to console her, feeling stupid and clumsy. But then I learned why she was crying. Harry Hansen had not come to visit her. Not even once.
“The son of a bitch, at least he could come and say good-bye,” she said. “That’s all I want. A good goddamned good-bye.”
She never saw Harry Hansen again. But one chill night in autumn, after Gerry Grogan had left the hospital, and after we had thrown her a welcome-home party, and after she’d begun the exercises for her ruined legs, Colt, the cop, walked over to us at the totem poles. He wanted to know if we knew a Harry Hansen. Tall, red-haired, Colt said. He was in the Lutheran Hospital in Bay Ridge with both of his legs broken. No, nobody ever heard of him.
“He’s not from around here,” Duke said. And after Colt left, we went to pick up Gerry Grogan to take her down to the Caton Inn.
THE BOY WAS COMING home from Coney Island one summer evening when he saw lights burning in the empty store. The store was across the street from the Minerva Theatre, where the gang called the Tigers lolled through all seasons in their zoot suits and pegged pants. The store had been empty all winter. Now the door was open, and the boy could see a one-armed man and an old Italian carpenter hammering away.
They were building a large slanted structure that filled the store, and the one-armed man held nails in his mouth, forced them into wood with his hand, then flipped a hammer that was tucked under his elbow and drove the nails into the wood. The boy, who was then twelve, watched this for a while, and then went home to climb into the bunk bed with his Brooklyn dreams.
The next day, the framework was covered with great sheets of plywood, and Seamus Grady, the one-armed man, was in business. He was a sign painter, and on the slanted plywood drawing table there were now large rolls of paper. Sheets of poster board were stacked on shelves under the tables, and a taboret was thick with jars of paint, cans of water, brushes of all shapes and sizes. The man worked with precision and delicacy, making signs for butcher shops and toy stores, bars and dry cleaners. Things for sale. Prices. The boy felt an odd excitement, watching the first artist he had ever seen.
A week later, while the Tigers were singing songs across the street, he saw that the shop window was now filled with some amazing things: large blown-up photostats, mounted on cardboard, of comic strips.
The one-armed man turned and peered at him through thick glasses; he was wearing a sleeveless undershirt and a headband to hold back the sweat.
“Yeah?” he said. “Can I help you?”
“Uh, I was, uh, looking in the window, and I was wondering…well, you see,
“Yeah, that Milton Caniff, he’s the best,” Grady said. He had a heavy Brooklyn accent and pronounced the name “Canipp.” He flicked his brush, loaded with red paint, and made a dollar sign in front of a 29. “You know why? He’s an
